> Why bother with the startup risk to make that amount?
One reason that hasn’t been mentioned yet as of this comment: ownership. Your startup is yours. You have the vision, you run the business, and there’s nobody to blame for anything but yourself.
When I was doing game development I got frustrated with the yearly post-mortem where we’d identify what things didn’t go well and what we could do to improve, only to make the same mistakes the next year. The company was relying on ambitious and hard-working people like me to keep fixing the same mistakes and avoid having to do deep planning and make hard decisions early.
With my own company, I still made mistakes but they were my mistakes to make and fix, and I never had to pull overtime to fix someone else’s mistake. I was far happier making a lot less money. (Up to a point… you can’t live on nothing. :P)
There are other benefits like doing both customer relations and engineering, which can make you better at both, and the slim potential for a large payout of FU money, among other things. Running a business isn’t for everyone, but wanting to and being willing to take all the responsibility is one thing you can’t get as a normal employee.
One reason that hasn’t been mentioned yet as of this comment: ownership. Your startup is yours. You have the vision, you run the business, and there’s nobody to blame for anything but yourself.
When I was doing game development I got frustrated with the yearly post-mortem where we’d identify what things didn’t go well and what we could do to improve, only to make the same mistakes the next year. The company was relying on ambitious and hard-working people like me to keep fixing the same mistakes and avoid having to do deep planning and make hard decisions early.
With my own company, I still made mistakes but they were my mistakes to make and fix, and I never had to pull overtime to fix someone else’s mistake. I was far happier making a lot less money. (Up to a point… you can’t live on nothing. :P)
There are other benefits like doing both customer relations and engineering, which can make you better at both, and the slim potential for a large payout of FU money, among other things. Running a business isn’t for everyone, but wanting to and being willing to take all the responsibility is one thing you can’t get as a normal employee.